[lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral :Law

I'm still in Houston and respecting all faiths and paths and
questions.

Good on you.

Reminds me that when Ruth and I arrived at the airport in Norfolk,
VA, to start our trip back to Japan on Tuesday, we found ourselves
directed to a special line set up for First Class and International
Passengers. I was, initially, a bit upset because we found ourselves
in back of a group of twenty fundamentalist Christians from the
Church of the Rock on the Eastern Shore, starting their own journey
to Bolivia, where they were scheduled to spend a week of manual labor
cleaning and repairing missionary churches, followed by participating
in a conference of Christian youth.

Had we started talking politics or theology, things might have turned
unpleasant. As it was, I found myself enjoying a classic
anthropological moment―chatting with people whose beliefs and values
and largely alien to my own who turned out, nonetheless, to be, at
least as far as this brief encounter went, some of the nicest people
I've met. I couldn't, moreover, not be impressed by their dedication.
All of the participants, including one boy aged 10, had raised the
money required to pay for the trip themselves, and to save money on
the flight they were looking forward to a 14-hour layover in Miami,
followed by a red-eye to Bogota. Couldn't help wondering how many of
my friends on the cultural left would do as much for the causes they
claim to believe in.